


A Hundred Thousand Loves (for just this one)

by unbelieve



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, ai newt, it's sad but it's not all sad, some of it's cute, way too much witty banter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22698016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unbelieve/pseuds/unbelieve
Summary: The Flare is a computer virus of unknown origin that corrupts and ultimately shuts down its host. As an android with a generation-outdated WCKD AI system, Newt always had roughly a 16.7% chance of infection. Maybe their days have been numbered as long as they've known each other and they just didn't realize until now, butnear the endis not the same asthe end.Minho's trying not to treat it as such.
Relationships: Harriet/Sonya | Elizabeth "Lizzy" (Maze Runner), Minho/Newt (Maze Runner), Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24
Collections: Pieces of Minewt





	A Hundred Thousand Loves (for just this one)

**Author's Note:**

> Eternal gratitude to Hannah and Jo for beta-ing (and thank u Anne for volunteering I just had to post now before I forgot to do it at all)
> 
> Title from Mika's "Tiny Love."

When Minho wakes, Newt’s back is to him, unmoving. 

That’s not inherently weird in itself. Newt doesn’t need to breathe, after all, and seems to have a random number generator pick his sleeping positions, but it’s hard to shake the sense that something’s off. 

“Newt?”

It takes a second for the reply. “Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

“I will be. Give me a moment to... reset.”

It takes 44 seconds for Newt to reboot himself, always exactly the same. Minho had asked a couple years ago when it had just been a matter of interest, and Newt hadn’t known, so they’d tested it, Minho watching the clock until Newt opened his eyes again. Even if he hadn’t counted it then, he would know now. More and more days start this way, and every time, Minho holds his breath through those 44 seconds, terrified that this will be the time Newt’s eyes won’t open.

Maybe it hadn’t even been a sense that something was off. Maybe it’s just statistical, at this point. 

The 44 seconds pass, though, and Newt makes a sound a little like an exhale, and the permanent tightness in Minho’s chest loosens just a fraction again. 

“Alright. I’m back,” Newt says, and rolls over, a faint smile on his face. Minho knows he’s faking it, but it makes both of them feel a little bit better, so he doesn’t say anything. They speak through a lot of facades, lately, ones that are ultimately pointless because they both know the truths they’re not saying, and yet ones they repaint every day. It’s an odd phenomenon, communicating this way, knowing that you may as well speak plainly and then not doing it, but some point they’d both chosen the same answer to the same silent question: what’s the point in voicing something horrible if you both know it?

Minho tries not to dwell. He can’t afford to, not in a race against time where he can’t see the finish line. He pushes everything away, as far as he can so maybe they can have a few interrupted moments before the world finds them again. 

He slides a little closer and rests his forehead against Newt’s for a second before leaning in to kiss him. 

Newt reaches up and slides his fingers into Minho’s hair, kissing him thoroughly back, and Minho shivers a little despite himself. Newt runs cold in the morning until his body warms up to operating temperature, and Newt knows that, the bastard, but he still does this all the time. Minho’s mostly willing to let it go, except he feels Newt fighting not to smile. “How is this still funny to you?”

“You still fall for it, instead of being patient for maybe two minutes.”

“I love you. Sue me.”

“Oh, good, my husband loves me,” Newt says, then drops his end of the back-and-forth. “But I love you too.”

Legally, they’re not married, but it doesn’t really matter, even for someone as pedantic as Newt can be. Legally, you can’t marry an AI, but the gold bands on both of their left ring fingers are a promise nonetheless, and no choice Minho had made before or since had been so easy. 

Distracted from his attempts to freeze Minho out of the bed, Newt traces his way through the geometric pattern tattooed on Minho’s shoulder, idly weaving different paths through the maze of black ink. He has a thing for Minho’s tattoos, something Minho has teased him about plenty of times, but in moments like this, Newt’s attention to the markings on his skin usually means he’s thinking about his own. 

On the back of Newt’s neck, there are three lines of text:

Property of WCKD Corporation  
Next Era Unit  
WT-255

It’s machine marked, unnaturally precise in its lines and spacing. It couldn’t be tattooed over, although Sonya had tried one time when they were all hanging around on a slow day in her shop. Whatever made his skin self-repairing also made it reject ink, which was a particularly odd thing to watch, a little like water boiling. In the end, though, the original text was still there, stark black against fair skin. 

“I don’t mind that it marks me as non-human, you know?” Newt had said after the failed attempt to cover it up. “I am what I am. I just don’t like that it brands me as theirs.”

To say that there’s no love lost between Newt and his creators would be a tremendous understatement. The story had come out over months, over the time he spent recovering in Sonya and Harriet’s guest bedroom, over nights at Minho’s, over moving in. He hadn’t just been a product of theirs, he’d been a test subject, a generation-older control to measure their newest models against. Eight hours a day of trials, the same things over and over to assure they had an accurate baseline, most of it designed as a competition he was intended to lose. 

It had worn him down, developing into something that would’ve been called “clinical depression” in a human, and it’s _almost_ funny, because if any AI could develop a sense of ennui, of course it would be Newt. It’s not, though, because it had led to Newt jumping out a seventh story window, and nothing about that could possibly be funny, even after six years.

WCKD hadn’t bothered to come for him, although they could’ve tracked him down easily enough. According to Newt, he’d been skewing their data near the end, so it was easier to write him off, and the more physical trials would've been hard with a leg that repairs itself the wrong way anyway. For a while, it almost seemed like things were going to be a little bit fair. But they never were, were they?

Newt’s hand goes still on his shoulder, and Minho’s immediately on high alert. He goes to ask, “Are you okay?” but abruptly cuts himself off. One look gives him his answer. 

There are warning signs when an episode is about to start, although he’d be hard pressed to put them into words. It’s a shift in body language, something foreign in Newt’s expression, something more that he can’t quite explain but can always identify. He takes a deep breath, and reminds himself not to take anything said over the next minute or so personally.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Newt snaps, with enough vitriol that Minho knows right away that this is going to be a bad one. 

“Okay,” he says, because he’s learned the easiest way to get through this is to just keep his answers as calm as possible, keep the whole thing from escalating further. “I won’t.”

“Can’t stand everyone’s pity. I mean, does everyone think I don’t see it? We go out and everyone’s looking at me like I’m about to die on the spot.”

“They’re not.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying.”

“So I’m just crazy.” Newt laughs. “Well, no shit, we know that, but either I’m crazy or you’re lying to me, so which one is it?”

The direct questions are the worst, the hardest to defuse safely no matter which wires he cuts. Maybe he’s paranoid, but it feels like they’re coming more and more often, like this corrupted version of Newt likes watching him struggle. “I’m not doing this.”

“Come on, at least put up a bloody fight.”

“I’m not going to fight you, Newt.”

Newt scoffs. “No, of course you’re not. I’m too fragile for that.”

“I don’t think you’re fragile.”

“Stupid of you. I was broken the first time you met me, I think that made it pretty obvious.” 

“You weren’t.”

“Functioning systems don’t throw themselves off of buildings. Functioning systems don’t permanently cripple themselves.” 

Instinctively, he reaches out to touch Newt, to reassure him, but almost as soon as his hand moves, he knows it’s a bad idea.

“Just leave me alone!” If you’d told Minho a year ago that he wouldn’t recognize his own husband’s voice sometimes, he would’ve dismissed it without a second thought. He’d heard Newt angry, of course, but it’s nothing like the way the virus twists his voice into something cruel and jagged and jarring, and he just wants this to be _over_ , but then Newt is repeating, “Get _out!_ Get out, get out-”

And then it stops. 

Minho takes a second to school his expression into something a little less shaken and a little more neutral, because that pause means that Newt, the real one, is coming back. He doesn’t need any more guilt when he arrives.

Newt shudders and shuts his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them, he’s himself again. “Jesus. Sorry.”

It’s a variation of the same thing every time, and Minho replies the same way he always does. “It’s not your fault.” Neither part of it really means anything, but they both feel a little better for saying it.

“They’re getting worse, aren’t they?” Newt tends not to remember the specifics of the things he’s said, memory corrupted along with everything else when an episode hits. “I feel like every time they’re angrier.”

“Maybe a little.”

“Fuck.”

“Don’t worry about it. I can deal with it.”

“It can’t be easy, hearing-“

“Newt,” Minho cuts him off. “It’s okay. At least it’s not like the first time, right?”

It’s supposed to be encouraging, because that had been the worst of it, when neither of them had known what was happening, but instead it just makes Newt turn away, half-curled into himself. Minho scoots up to wrap around him, one arm slung over Newt’s waist, and he tenses for a second before seeming to deflate. 

“It’s okay,” Minho says, another variation on the same theme. 

Newt shifts a little, interlacing his fingers with Minho’s. “Not really. But we both know that.”

They’re both quiet for a couple minutes, both locked in silent attempts at recovery. Minho tries not to let anything Newt says during an episode get to him, he really does, but sometimes he can’t help but wonder what parts of it Newt might actually mean. He wants to assume that none of it is real, and he knows that’s what Newt would want him to assume, but sometimes the knives are just a bit too sharp, a bit too close to his heart for comfort. He always pushes it aside eventually, always has to choose to think it doesn’t mean anything, but sometimes it takes a little longer. 

“You’re going to hate hearing me say this,” Newt says softly, “but sometimes I can’t wait for it to end.”

“Well, you’re right. I did hate hearing that,” Minho says, trying to inject the faintest scrap of levity into the whole thing. 

“I know. I’m just tired of being scared.”

“You’re yourself most of the time.”

“Is it worth the times I’m not?”

Minho knows it’s not really what Newt is asking, but he still says, “It is to me. It is to everyone that knows you.”

Newt makes a noise that’s not quite disagreement but certainly isn’t assent, and goes quiet again. 

Minho gives him a minute or two, then presses a kiss to his neck, a second one a little lower, a third at the top of the slope of his shoulder. 

“It’s not that easy,” Newt says, but the barest hint of a smile in his voice gives him away. 

Minho kisses his neck again. “But it is.”

Newt holds out for about thirty seconds before flipping over to kiss Minho properly. 

Minho’s happy to oblige for a moment, before pulling away a little to ask, “Hmm, what was that about it not being that easy?”

“It’s a really unfortunate weakness, but I happen to think you’re gorgeous.”

“If anything, I think that’s a strength. It means your eyes work.”

“You’re the worst.”

Minho grins. “I know you are, but what am I?”

“Oh, so we’re about nine years old, is that what we are?”

“Millions spent developing you and that’s the best you can come up with?”

“Millions of years of human evolution and ‘I know you are, but what am I?’ was the best you could come up with.”

“I’m trying to go easy on you so I’m spared when the AI uprising comes.”

Newt rolls his eyes. “Really, just unequivocally the worst.”

“You’re so very sweet.”

“Mmmm, I know you are, but what am I?”

“Oh, fuck you, that was kind of cute.”

The self-satisfied smirk on Newt’s face is much better than the melancholy of earlier, but Minho figures he still has a moral obligation to kiss it off of him. 

It’s like this a lot now. They tease and they kiss and they spend weekends in bed the way they used to when their relationship was new, because they need to make the bad days into good ones somehow. The alternative is not having many good days left, or maybe none at all. 

Maybe they should’ve seen the time bomb from the start. Newer WCKD AI systems are almost universally protected against the Flare virus, but the slightly older NE models have something like a one in six chance of infection. It’s just that part of being human is thinking you’ll be lucky until you finally aren’t, and maybe humanity couldn’t prevent itself from bestowing that on its creations as well.

So, yes, they spend a lot of time in bed, pretending very thoroughly that the outside world doesn’t exist. 

The one lie Minho tells Newt is that he has no internal sense of time. In reality, he’s been oddly accurate about it his whole life, but if he pretends he doesn’t know, he can pretend he doesn’t need to get up. Newt almost definitely knows he’s lying by now, of course, but they both have a list of things they let each other get away with, up to a point. Unfortunately, that point is always a little after noon, and they always hit it far too fast.

“You need to eat,” Newt says, pulling himself out of Minho’s arms.

“I’m fine, come back.”

“I’ve been informed that you need food to live.” Newt gets up, and Minho sighs, finally rolling out of bed.

“You sound like an alien who majored in Earth Studies.”

“I thought that was a stunning impression of a robot.”

Minho grins. “Keep it up and I might start to think you’re not human.”

“That would be so incredibly observant of you.”

There are contact lenses on the market that let you capture images as you see them. Minho had never gone for them- it's lucky his vision is good, because the idea of putting anything in his eye has never been something he’s particularly fond of. But Newt smiles over his shoulder at him, hair sticking up a little on one side, and Minho desperately wishes he’d been able to freeze that moment. This is what he needs to remember, quiet and easy, all the chaos of being alive falling away because if Newt is looking at him like that, nothing can be wrong.

This is what threatens to tear the heart out of him when it goes.

He shoves that thought away again, reminding himself that if he spends too long constructing defenses, threading barbed wire through his ribs and around his lungs, he’ll miss everything that’s left. He just follows Newt into the kitchen and grabs a meal prep container out of the fridge, doing his best to ignore the way Newt wrinkles his nose when he digs into it cold. 

“Leave me alone, you don’t even eat.”

“I can still recognize absolute barbarism when I see it.”

“I need you to be less posh right now.”

“Can’t help you there.”

Minho makes a face at him and goes back to eating. The cold broccoli isn’t actually all that good, but he’s not about to cave and give Newt the satisfaction.

When he's done, he tosses the container in the sink with an "I'll do it later, I swear," and waves the apartment speaker on, selecting a preset with old slow dance music. Before Newt, a little alone and a lot adrift, he used to listen to it when he was trying to feel something deeper. Now he knows every feeling he used to miss. 

“This is so bloody cliché,” Newt complains, although he’s very clearly trying not to smile. “I don’t know how everyone in the world doesn’t know you’re a hopeless romantic.” Still, he takes Minho’s hand when it’s offered, resting the other on his waist and swaying in time.

“None of them need to know.”

“It should still be obvious to the casual observer.”

Minho spins Newt around, the careful balancing act easy as breathing, as easy as breathing used to be. “I can’t allow for casual observers, they might fall madly in love with me.” 

Newt snorts. “Now that I highly doubt.”

“Are you saying you didn’t?”

“I’m saying it took a little longer than that.”

“Hmm. Well, your questionable taste isn’t on me.”

“Shut up,” Newt says, smiling now, and Minho feels that tightness in his chest again. It’s hard not to see everything good as bittersweet if he stands still long enough, and he hates it because Newt’s the only thing in his whole life that he’s wanted to stand still for. 

Newt knows what he’s thinking, because he always does, and he reaches up to cup Minho’s cheek. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m still here.”

Minho doesn’t say, “For how long?” because they both know that they don’t know, and he doesn’t say that a couple hours ago Newt had talked about not wanting to be. Instead, he turns to kiss the palm of Newt’s hand, and says, “Okay.”

The song ends and another starts, and their steps still aren’t quite a waltz but are just a little closer, and for a moment they could be somewhere more beautiful than barefoot in the kitchen, if they wanted to be. Minho doesn’t want to be. He only wants this as it is, forever.

When Minho was twenty-three and Newt was something like it, a couple months into the idea of _them_ , they’d been in the kitchen after a party and Minho had asked, “How do you know if what you’re feeling is... real, I guess?”

It was the kind of question he’d been just drunk enough to ask and just sober enough to worry about a second after, but Newt had just shrugged and said, “Same as you. Signals get sent and interpreted. Your brain just happens to be organic, neurotransmitters and synapses and such.”

“So, hypothetically, if I told you I love you, and you said it back-“

“It would be real, yeah. _Are_ you telling me?”

“Maybe. Yes. Yeah, I am.”

“Then I’m saying it back.”

Minho had laughed at that, and Newt had given him a _look_ , and Minho had just laughed harder before finally managing to get out, “We’re not good at this, are we?”

Newt had held out for another couple seconds before cracking a smile. “Not so much, no. On the bright side, we can try again.”

“I was kind of hoping I’d get the chance to say it more than once.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Newt had said, grinning wider. 

“Okay, whatever. I love you.”

“The ‘whatever’ really sold it this time. But I love you too, and… I promise you that’s real.”

And in a mimicry of his younger self, barefoot in the kitchen, almost-twenty-nine-year-old Minho snakes a hand around the back of Newt's neck and kisses him softly.  


————

  
When Vesuvius erupted, the citizens of Pompeii didn’t know their deaths were coming, ashes falling thick and fast. The people of Herculaneum had time to run, but some of them didn’t, and Minho thinks he understands now. Sometimes you stay as the end rushes in because you don’t know how to walk away, and if everything you love is going to burn, you might as well be there when it happens.

It happens.

The 44 seconds turn into 45, 46, 47, three minutes, an hour, twenty-three hours of more and more desperate begging for this to just be a temporary glitch, praying with the trembling of his hands and the way his heart slams against his ribs, but the night passes and there are no excuses left to make. 

Minho doesn’t talk to anyone for three days. He doesn’t leave his house, ignores every attempt his friends make to contact him. They work it out for themselves at some point. 

WCKD shows up to collect Newt’s body sometime during the first day. They’d decided it wasn’t worth the resources to find him while he was still active, but now that he’s shut down they suddenly want to take him back, parents presiding over the funeral of a child they disowned. He thinks about Newt disassembled, studied to figure out what went wrong, and he knows he screams at them, although later he doesn’t remember what. 

A lot of those three days is missing from his memory. The one time he remembers eating it’s just handfuls of dry cereal out of the box, because Newt hated that and maybe if he does enough things Newt hates, he’ll come back just to yell at him for it. He sleeps, maybe. Showers once, but doesn’t really get clean, just stares at the tile until the water has long since gone cold.

He’s been ignoring his messages, swiping them away almost as soon as they pop up, but on the morning of the fourth day, he gets one from Sonya that’s odd enough to make him pause. 

“check the top right dresser drawer.” 

Nothing else. It doesn’t contain any attempt at consolation, and he’s grateful. 

The top right dresser drawer is mostly a junk drawer. Minho doesn’t open it much, and Newt always bitches- _bitched, past tense_ \- at him to clean it out, but they both knew he was never actually going to do it. It's a little like Newt is laughing at him, because Sonya's text must mean he'd left something in the one place he knew Minho wouldn't find it. 

On the top of the pile of things he's been meaning to deal with for years, there's an envelope. He stands there with it in his hands for a moment, locked in a standoff with himself. Part of him is desperate to open it as fast as he can, read the last words Newt left him like they’re the only thing protecting him from oblivion. Part of him wants to stand here at the edge of it forever, because it can't be over if he doesn't take that last step. He's not sure how long he remains motionless. Eventually, though, he flips it over and opens it, pulling out the paper inside. 

Something else falls to the floor and he jumps, the noise unexpected in the silent house. It's a silver cylinder, small, but just the right size to contain something, and he turns it over and over in his fingers for a moment, feeling as though the weight of it is multiplied with every second. He sits down on the bed, still clutching it in his left hand as he opens the letter. His hands are steady, somehow. It doesn't feel like they should be.

Newt's handwriting is perfect, because it couldn't be any other way. It was one of his quirks, like the way he arranged things in perfectly straight lines, or the fact that sometimes, if you caught him at the exact right time, he’d be standing absolutely perfectly still. Maybe it had been a byproduct of what he was, but it had always felt like he would’ve been the same way in any form. Nonsensically, Minho thinks about how if he was to look in the medicine cabinet, everything in it would be alphabetized, all the same distance from the edge of the shelf, all with the labels facing out, and it’s so goddamn stupid that thinking about a medicine cabinet makes him feel that deep, empty ache, but that doesn’t change that it does.

He takes a breath, lets it out slowly, and starts reading. 

_I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this is me finally getting back at you for not sorting out that drawer. Well, you’re right._

Something that’s half a laugh and half a sob and all a strangled mess makes its way out of Minho’s lungs at that. 

_Sorry. You know I love you. But you have to admit, it was a good hiding place. Thank Sonya for me, if her text was how you found it. Or regardless, really. Figured it’d be best with her, since the two of you are kind of the same way about emotions._

_I think I’m stalling. I’ve already said the thing that matters most, which is that I love you, but this is kind of uncharted territory. I wonder if any other AI has written something like this. I don’t know if any other AI has had this much to lose. Wouldn’t trade a moment of it, though, not for absolutely anything. I don't know what I would have been if I'd never met you, if I'd never had every minute of the last six years. I don't know what a version of me that didn't have you and our friends would be like, and I'm glad I'll never have to find out. I'm sorry that this is how it's ending, though. I really am. I've accepted it, I think (I hope?), but I wish I could spare you somehow. I did do something that I hope will help, though._

_I can get you one last conversation. I wish I could do more, but I think as soon as you open it, the virus will spread too fast for more than that. In a way, I think that’s a good thing, actually. I don’t want you to get stuck. Go see the whole rest of the world, do everything we didn’t have time for, and if you fall in love again don’t you dare feel guilty about it, okay? You’re still alive, and I want you to act like it._

_There’s so much more to say, but I don’t know how to say it. Hopefully by the time you load up the file, that version of me will have figured it out. If not, you already know the important things._

_I love you, and I promise you it’s real._

_Newt_

Minho folds the letter back up and rests it against his forehead for a second, eyes closed, as though he can commit every word to memory if he doesn’t let anything else in. 

He’s not sure how long he sits like that before turning his attention to the cylinder in his other hand. He screws off the top and delicately extracts a whitish-silver interface film, unrolling it carefully. 

A contact information transfer. One last conversation. 

He tries to wait, terrified to use the last of his time wrong, but the house is the kind of quiet that runs him into the ground moment by moment. His friends are still trying to talk to him, still messaging and calling and doing everything short of breaking down his door, but he doesn’t want to talk to any of them, doesn’t want to hear any of the too-gentle things people want to say, spoken like he’s breakable. He’s not breakable, he’s broken, and he only wants to talk to Newt. 

In the end, he only makes it a day. Twenty-two hours and forty-seven minutes, to be exact, but there’s nobody left in the apartment to be that perfectly accurate, and Minho’s sense of time had stopped working five days ago anyway. He stands in front of the screen in their bedroom, interface film held to his palm, and closes his eyes. He presses his hand against the data reader, and out of habit, he counts. 

At 44 seconds, Newt’s voice says, “Hey.”

Minho can’t say anything for a moment, can’t even catch the air in his lungs. He wants to say everything that’s left, but everything is hard to begin, and when he learns to breathe again he just says, “Hey.”


End file.
